nada miami, 2023

Heather benjamin

Booth #C214

December 5 - 9, 2023

Ice Palace Studios, 59 NW 14th Street, Miami, FL, 33136

Olympia is thrilled to present new paintings and ceramics by Brooklyn-based artist Heather Benjamin. 

Benjamin’s work is a surrealist incursion into self-portraiture. Her avatars —  female warriors, lone cowgirls, winged fairies and sphinxes – inhabit a cosmic desert landscape populated by psychedelic flora. Electric storms light up the perpetual night sky. Benjamin’s figures, vessels for her own diaristic explorations of personal narratives, navigate the psychological landscapes of womanhood, shifting between emotional polarities. 

Ongoing themes include sexuality and gender, power, self-perception, and the too-much-ness of women and girls, rendered in aesthetic overload.

Benjamin creates her own mythology through the use of recurring symbols. Flaming roses, broken mirrors and lockets, heart planets, butterflies, nail-polished claws, cowgirl accessories emblazoned with short poems. In this new body of work, narratives are met with an even more maximalist approach, combining frenetic compositions with other-worldly palettes to create complex, intricate universes where conflicting realities exist simultaneously.

Heather Benjamin (b. 1989, New York) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has had solo exhibitions at New Image Art (LA), Commune (Tokyo), the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard (NY), Underdogs (Lisbon), and Bim Bam Gallery (Paris). Selected group exhibitions include Jeffrey Deitch (LA), Andrew Edlin (NY), Invisible Exports (NY), and Over The Influence (Hong Kong). Benjamin has also been self-publishing zines and artist books of her work since 2008. She lives and works in New York City.

INSTALLATION VIEWS: